2002-01-21 - 3:19

Almost human

Ah yes, now I remember what I've been meaning to mention for the last few days: Ozzy Osbourne and family are getting their own TV show. How bizarre will that be? I'd almost be tempted to order the otherwise dreadful Canadian MTV just to see that.

You have to realize that I'm seeing this entry on a monitor decorated with a "What Would Ozzy Do?" sticker. (Plus stickers for The Dears and Palace; but that's another story.) Once he started stuttering and stammering, Ozzy could read his grocery list and I'd laugh. And I'm allowed to make fun of Ozzy, since I've been close enough to the front at a Black Sabbath concert that he splashed water on me.

Staying on the metal theme, it looks like I may scrap my plan to hit Montreal next week for Slayer, since they are apparently playing Hull in February, at the arena where the Olympiques play. Naturally, I'd prefer the Metropolis to a hockey arena; but I'll take a trip across the bridge over a two hour jaunt to Montreal. Maybe I'll be able to convince someone (Greg, perhaps) to catch the show, as well.

Little has been on the go this weekend. I played on the computer for most of yesterday, so I stayed away from it for most of today. I was hoping that Colin would have the time to come over with his guitar, so we could rock it to the Maxwell House; but he ended up being busy. That's too bad--it has been ages since we got together and played. One of these days . . .

You know that it is a house of geeks when we have three web servers running. Anyway, we recently moved them all onto one gateway, which lets us get away with paying for one IP address and sharing all of our computers behind the gateway. Unfortunately, the cable company changes the IP address very frequently lately, which screws my web server until a DNS update is made the next morning. Admittedly, I'm not hosting anything of importance; but the downtime was still annoying me.

So, I registered a domain tonight, which will currently be used for only my home page. It should kick in tomorrow, after which any address changes will propogate quickly. I couldn't get any version of "Chichester," which is my usual Internet name. In theory, I could have thought for a while and come up with something particularly clever. Once the idea arose, though, I wanted to get it done quickly, so I flipped through some song lyrics and saw this passage from Cave's epic "O'Malley's Bar":

Well, I checked the chamber of my gun
Saw I had one final bullet left
My hand, it looked almost human
As I raised it bravely to my head

So, I settled on "Almost Human": almosthuman.ca to be precise. (At the time that I'm writing this, it's not active; but it should be up soon.) It's a musical reference and it totally contradicts the (also stolen) title of this site. And if there are two things that I'm all about, they are musical references and self-contradictions, so with that title, I'm all set.

Also, the song itself is somewhat dark (you probably guessed that), but also rather amusing, if you hear it all. But then, I find most of Murder Ballads to be darkly comic.

At any rate, I'm satisfied with that for a domain name. After it's working, I'll update my links and hope that it deals with the (now frequent) network changes a little better.

As an added bonus, the title is vague enough that I might get a whole new crop of weirdos finding my page, to supplement the head shave fetishists who currently make up half of my traffic.

J.